That's more like it...

The other day I showed you my first, strangely-shaped, Daikon radish. Now I have harvested a Daikon that is more normal... ("Straight" maybe?)

This is a BIG radish...

The best part of 9 inches long - and that's after I cut off the long thin tap-root. And I'm sure that if I had left this veggie in the ground it would have grown a lot bigger. This one Daikon is nearly as big in total mass as all the "ordinary" radishes I grew in the Spring! And I have several more of them too.

We ate (most of) this one in an oriental salad to go with a Cambodian-style pork curry - along with carrot, cucumber, spring onion, beansprouts and chilli, with a soy sauce and lime-juice dressing. The daikon was nice; not too strongly-flavoured, but crunchy yet succulent at the same time. I would think that it would also be good briefly stir-fried, maybe with some black bean sauce.

Still on the oriental veg theme, I have also harvested some Komatsuna. This is a vegetable of which I have almost no experience, so again I am experimenting with it. So far we have used its leaves as a salad ingredient, but we couldn't eat them fast enough that way, and now some of the leaves have got too big to be used in salads, so I cut them for using as a cooked vegetable.

We cooked the Komatsuna simply, on its own, in a steamer. This way we were able to try it out without any other ingredients masking its flavour. The verdict: I liked it (though if we have it again I will probably stir-fry it with some other things, like garlic, chilli, ginger, oyster sauce or soy sauce), but Jane didn't like it. To be fair, Jane generally doesn't like any of the oriental brassicas like Bak Choi, Pak Choi, Choi Sum etc. Being honest, I must say that I prefer most of those to Komatsuna because I like their fleshy stems, and Komatsuna stems are not a significant feature of the plant. I think we may stick to using it as a salad ingredient.